Techspot: AMD Polaris 10 performance will reportedly be on par with Radeon 390/390X

[Drunkenvalley]

I think over-broadening the definition of gamer to the point of just being "a person" kinda makes the point of a definition moot. With all the talk about how X and Y and Z could be considered a gamer, I think inherently mostly everyone understand what market it is meant to refer to, and diluting the phrase to the point of uselessness is helping no one.

Overgeneralizing the phrase is also extremely pointless to start within this context. When talking about "the gamer market", the requirement is fairly straightforward: It needs to be able to play new games at acceptable quality.

What does that mean? It means you're not drastically behind the curve of the hardware requirements. That's it. Yes, Intel HD graphics would run Skyrim a few years ago, but only at such a minimum amount of quality that it's only barely functional. I used to have a laptop during WLK where I had 7 fps during Marrowgar, and only marginally above 15 for the rest of the game. Etc.

So where does the mythical enthusiast come into play? That's the more vague one, but going far above and beyond recommended specs is probably the most accurate way of phrasing it at a glance.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents. I think trying to bicker over the definition of gamer, or what the gamer market refers to, is completely pointless and only serves to sidetrack the show.

[Sheevah]

Perhaps it's counterproductive to argue semantics over the term 'gamer', but that very definition (along with others) is the driving force behind much of the debates that have been going on in this thread and the Nvidia 1080 thread. I've seen tons of posts about how "X AMD card won't compete with Y Nvidia card and will never be mainstream for gamers due to costing Z dollars, 'cause my definition of gamer means they'll spend B amount and replace a card every C years." The bias behind our personal definitions of not only what we are looking for in a piece of hardware, but what we expect others to want is resulting in a lot of posts where people are talking past each other at a point in time where we are dealing with very limited information.

That's really all I've been trying to get at. I'm sorry it took so much real estate to say it plainly.

[Artorius]

You're absolutely correct @Sheevah

[Drunkenvalley]

I see what you mean then, Sheevah.

Personally, I think too many people here are fanatically hellbent on calling AMD's doom way ahead of time. I don't think they belong on these forums at all. Many of them are just flat out anti-consumer and will do anything to argue in favor of nVidia.
* New slides came out showing GTX 1080 performance! Praise Jesus! AMD is dead! Hallelujah! Oh what's that, slides from AMD? Those guys are liars. They're not honest people like nVidia, who come on stage showing off incomplete products held together by wooden screws.
* AMD does a paperlaunch? My god, how dare they? (HD 7970.) Oh, wait, the new GTX 1080 "released" nearly a month ahead of even being in store! Nobody's even batting an eye over that.
* New cards from nVidia are out! AMD will really have to hurry it up and release something new! (GTX 680 vs HD 7970)
* GTX 680 released for ca 5k NOK. Now, the GTX 1080 costs a little shy of 8k NOK? Holy shitballs, this escalated quickly. What's that? AMD are releasing a lower-priced card? They can't compete with that pricetag! It's too high!
* Ugh, AMD reference coolers are so awful! They're nothing like the GTX 1080, which begins to throttle after 10 minutes of use.

Etc, etc. This just keeps on going. And then they have the gall to say "But if AMD had competitive cards, I'd jump ship!", and so far I think the number of people who I can sincerely believe on that is somewhere between 0 and 1.

[Lathais]

God damn you people. The whole point was just to show, and the steam hardware survey shows it quite well, that the 970 outsold the 960. Which one is considered mainstream? The $200 card that sold less or the $350 card that sold more? Plain and fucking simple. Instead it gets turned into a debate on what the definition of gamer is. What the actual fuck? Some people seem to have this definition of mainstream in their head that mainstream is $250. Well, if that were the case, would there not have been more 960s sold than 970s? Ok, so the 970 has been out longer, but before the 960 it was the 750ti. Add the two of them together and they still did not sell as much as the 970. So what's mainstream?

[Deleted]

God damn you people. The whole point was just to show, and the steam hardware survey shows it quite well, that the 970 outsold the 960. Which one is considered mainstream? The $200 card that sold less or the $350 card that sold more? Plain and fucking simple. Instead it gets turned into a debate on what the definition of gamer is. What the actual fuck? Some people seem to have this definition of mainstream in their head that mainstream is $250. Well, if that were the case, would there not have been more 960s sold than 970s? Ok, so the 970 has been out longer, but before the 960 it was the 750ti. Add the two of them together and they still did not sell as much as the 970. So what's mainstream?

pretty sure mainstream in this context is a pricerange (by definition). Budget-mainstream-highend-enthusiast. What exactly those price ranges are can be debated but i'm pretty sure the whole concept has nothing to do with what actually sells the most.

[Vash The Stampede]

pretty sure mainstream in this context is a pricerange (by definition). Budget-mainstream-highend-enthusiast. What exactly those price ranges are can be debated but i'm pretty sure the whole concept has nothing to do with what actually sells the most.

Regardless, the industry needs cheap 970/390 like performance. This is what VR needs at least to run optimal. And it doesn't matter if the 970 is mainstream or not, because the majority of people on Steam are running junk graphic cards. Besides Intel who makes up a good amount of users on Steam, you have people with GeForce 9600's, and Radeon HD 5450's. It gets worse with people still running ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200. That's onboard chipset junk graphics from 2008.

If you want better looking PC games, then we need to get people to upgrade.

[SodiumChloride]

If you want better looking PC games, then we need to get people to upgrade.

>.>

Hate to break this to you. But PC doesn't drive the capital intensive AAA industry.

[Artorius]

>.>

Hate to break this to you. But PC doesn't drive the capital intensive AAA industry.

Sometimes I'm under the impression that people actually think that most "AAA" developers actually care about PC. As if consoles weren't dominant and dictated the industry, but I think it's only an impression. Right?

[Vash The Stampede]

>.>

Hate to break this to you. But PC doesn't drive the capital intensive AAA industry.

You're right. The PS4 is the primadonna of the gaming industry today. But PC gaming has it's own exclusive games coming out, and the better the average hardware the better the games. If enough people have powerful hardware, then eventually we might have studios that will break away from the PC/PS4/XB1 mold and maybe try to make a PC exclusive title. We already have lots of these games, particularly Indie games, multiplayer games, and etc, but nothing like Crysis or Quake. Otherwise all we PC gamers can hope to look forward to is Nvidia's Hairworks.

[mrgreenthump]

>.>

Hate to break this to you. But PC doesn't drive the capital intensive AAA industry.

There are still some studios that care about their performance on PC though and want to innovate past console capabilities.

When creating a game/game engine you do want to reach the most people possible for a platform. Now if you do PC only it means you probably go with the Blizzard route of the game being able to be run by a toaster, rather than Crysis route of nobody can run it.. And that kinda kills all the motivation to innovate and create truly good looking games for PC.

People getting loads of 970s kinda helped with this though, because now putting a 970 as a baseline for 60fps on 1080p is something one can do. And with Polaris giving same level of performance for sub $300 it should only get better.

[Artorius]

The only "exciting" thing about PC "AAA" gaming right now that actually could make it more popular is VR, but taking into consideration how bad and expensive the current headsets are I wouldn't really say that it'll drive the industry anytime soon.

The "real" gaming is at lightweight games that everyone can play, not those ridiculously heavy games that more than often don't even look that good but are hardware-heavy anyway.

[Vash The Stampede]

People getting loads of 970s kinda helped with this though, because now putting a 970 as a baseline for 60fps on 1080p is something one can do. And with Polaris giving same level of performance for sub $300 it should only get better.

This is also why Legion requires a minimum of GT 440 or Radeon HD 5670 or Intel HD Graphics 5000. That means anyone with a PC built within the past 5 years won't have an issue playing this game. You know the game is tame when Intel graphics are a minimum requirement. Even Overwatch is tame with similar if not weaker system requirements. Blizzard must have done some serious tweaks to OverWatch to require a Intel HD 4400. DOTA2 will run on nVidia GeForce 8600/9600GT, ATI/AMD Radeon HD2600/3600. And Valve is going to release it soon with Vulkan support, to make the game even more accessible.

These games are built with the main focus for accessibility since these are online games. Cause someone bought a GT 440 from 2010 and is still using it to play these games. Single player games like Fallout 4 couldn't care about your Radeon HD 2600, cause it was built around the PS4 specs. Developers don't care, because better hardware means more work to make better graphics. They will cater to the audience they have.

[Artorius]

This is also why Legion requires a minimum of GT 440 or Radeon HD 5670 or Intel HD Graphics 5000. That means anyone with a PC built within the past 5 years won't have an issue playing this game. You know the game is tame when Intel graphics are a minimum requirement. Even Overwatch is tame with similar if not weaker system requirements. Blizzard must have done some serious tweaks to OverWatch to require a Intel HD 4400. DOTA2 will run on nVidia GeForce 8600/9600GT, ATI/AMD Radeon HD2600/3600. And Valve is going to release it soon with Vulkan support, to make the game even more accessible.

These games are built with the main focus for accessibility since these are online games. Cause someone bought a GT 440 from 2010 and is still using it to play these games. Single player games like Fallout 4 couldn't care about your Radeon HD 2600, cause it was built around the PS4 specs. Developers don't care, because better hardware means more work to make better graphics. They will cater to the audience they have.

If you take into consideration that Firefox for example is compiled with support for CPUs as old as fucking Pentium IIIs, this "5 years old" support that Blizzard is giving doesn't really sound as bad. Besides, having support for old hardware is something good.

If the games were made only to be run at cards stronger than a GTX950 for example, then they'd already be marketing a small playerbase in comparison to something that can run on a toaster. We have to remember that it's all about money and they'll always do what's more lucrative.

[Vash The Stampede]

If you take into consideration that Firefox for example is compiled with support for CPUs as old as fucking Pentium IIIs, this "5 years old" support that Blizzard is giving doesn't really sound as bad. Besides, having support for old hardware is something good.

If the games were made only to be run at cards stronger than a GTX950 for example, then they'd already be marketing a small playerbase in comparison to something that can run on a toaster. We have to remember that it's all about money and they'll always do what's more lucrative.

FireFox can run on a Pentium 3 cause it doesn't make use of newer extensions. If FireFox has no benefits from SSE3 or AVX, then why use it?

Anyway, it's good to support older hardware but not the way we're doing it. Games today scale up, where games like HL2 scaled down. Half Life 2 can run on DX6 and looked really bad. For example Fallout 4 was released and soon afterwards Gameworks features were added. These features do make the games more demanding, but at the same time they do very little for the game. Where a game like Crysis was so demanding that people were complaining, even though they could just turn down the graphics settings. People didn't want to hear their super extreme PC was not up to the task of playing the game.

This is how games like Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 worked. Very good chance a PC at that time couldn't run those games with max settings. You had to scale the graphics down, which is fine. Where with OverWatch you're scaling the graphics up, and that's just giving a very minor image quality upgrade. But this is again because the PS4 is the standard, but so is the average PC users hardware. It would be really nice if AMD could break this stagnated market and migrate 970/390 graphics performance down to the $200 level. This benefits every PC gamer, including those who buy 1080's or AMD Vega's.

[mrgreenthump]

It would be really nice if AMD could break this stagnated market and migrate 970/390 graphics performance down to the $200 level. This benefits every PC gamer, including those who buy 1080's or AMD Vega's.

Mm, if I had to pick one good thing about all this VR hype is that.. the requirements for it to be good, means PC performance has to skyrocket and that again leads to non-VR gaming benefiting along with it.

[Vash The Stampede]

Mm, if I had to pick one good thing about all this VR hype is that.. the requirements for it to be good, means PC performance has to skyrocket and that again leads to non-VR gaming benefiting along with it.

Another thing to consider is it currently sucks for consoles. Which means the VR craze for the moment is PC exclusive. Yes there is the Sony's PlayStation VR, but that would likely not be good to use on a PS4. Maybe a PS4 Neo, but we'll have to see how well the Neo sells. For the moment the PC industry has the opportunity to capture market share away from consoles, which would hopefully bring about new and exciting games.

The thing that sucks is that Polaris might end up in the Neo, but the 8 core Jaguars are going to stay the same except for higher clocks. Good enough for VR, but back to PC games revolving around junk hardware. A $200 R9 480 card would be a lot cheaper than buying a $400 PS4 Neo, and just about everyone has a faster CPU than a overclocked Jaguar.

[SodiumChloride]

Another thing to consider is it currently sucks for consoles. Which means the VR craze for the moment is PC exclusive. Yes there is the Sony's PlayStation VR, but that would likely not be good to use on a PS4. Maybe a PS4 Neo, but we'll have to see how well the Neo sells. For the moment the PC industry has the opportunity to capture market share away from consoles, which would hopefully bring about new and exciting games.

The thing that sucks is that Polaris might end up in the Neo, but the 8 core Jaguars are going to stay the same except for higher clocks. Good enough for VR, but back to PC games revolving around junk hardware. A $200 R9 480 card would be a lot cheaper than buying a $400 PS4 Neo, and just about everyone has a faster CPU than a overclocked Jaguar.

PS VR is probably what will push VR into the mainstream - if it catches on.

On PC ... is there even a standardized API for VR yet?

[Remilia]

We really going into platform war again? Not everything has to be about this shit, it gets old real fast.

[SodiumChloride]

We really going into platform war again? Not everything has to be about this shit, it gets old real fast.

Just stating the facts.

Platform war is going to be a thing on PC unless a company with clout like MS steps in and put their foot down with something like DX-VR and gets everyone on board.

Oculus and HTC to my knowledge aren't cooperating. I won't be surprised if other entries to the market will be doing their own thing as well.